Real As Morning
by Rashaka
Summary: A nice, destructive little jaunt into the Slayer’s head at the end of Tabula Rasa.


My second Buffy-fic!  Whoo-hoo!  And not to long after the first… go check that out people; I only got two reviews for it so far.  It's called "How to Grow a Homemade Soul".  C'mon.   Go read it.  'S about Spike. And 's not mushy, I promise.

This is another post- Tabula Rasa story.  I can't help it, that episode just begged to be interpreted. I can't say if this is S/B or not, because like the show right now it could go either way, depending on your take of it.  A nice little jaunt into the Slayer's head.

_By Rashaka_**  
****Real As Morning**

     Don't look at me like that.  Don't beg me for crumbs anymore, please.  

     He just stares at me, testing the waters, looking for what he hopes to see somewhere inside, looking for that glimmer.

     So fucking blue.  That's what his eyes are.  They're like morning.  That color in the morning sky, just before the edge of the climbing sun, that color so blue you want to grab it and bottle it and use it to paint everything you see.

     My god, my nameless god of the heaven I was stolen from, I'm harping on the eye color of a vampire.  What's wrong with me?  Nah, pointless question.  I know exactly what's wrong with me.  And now they all do too.

     I snap my head away, breaking gaze with the blue.  For a moment, he stands, and I know that if I turn now I'll see that look on his face—that look that says so much.  My smitten vampire, who wears his heart on his sleeve and has since the day I met him.  His face is as always expressive, raw.  

     I don't turn back, don't give him his crumb this time, because I don't want to see the pain of that rawness, the pain that I've put there.

     Before I can stop myself I think of Angel; I compare them.  Why is it that I keep doing that?  I know that it's not something I should be thinking about.  The two are so far apart, so radically different, that comparison seems trite, silly.  Childish.  Like comparing the ability of fish to fly and birds to breathe water.  

     And yet… he's a vampire who says he loves the Slayer, and he's not the first on the short, short list. A list of two.  Two people who aren't quite people, both with the ability use those wildly different eyes to see into me.

     Blue to brown.  Shining and screaming to soft and absorbing. Lines of mad laughter to lines of pain.  The only thing their eyes have in common, I suppose, is the age behind them.  Eyes having seen years of memories beyond anything I could know.  I suppose my eyes must have age in them too, from the way Dawn watches me, but I know the age is different.  My age is from too much emotion in too short a life; theirs is from not enough emotion, until all that they have to feel has been built and broken and gathered and scattered and changed over and over again after centuries of existence.  

     My knight in white has spent half those centuries regaining the emotions, my thief in black spent all but the last two years trying to wipe them away.

     The expressions my unwelcome suitor wears... so different from Angel.  Angel veiled what he felt, sharing it with me only in those moments when we were truly alone, when there was no one else to glimpse what he showed me.  And sometimes, even alone, I had to request it.  Angel was honest and true with his answers, but sometimes it hurt to have to ask, to not be able to just *know*, to just feel it in my bones.  He knew me though, read me like a book.  Read into me the way Spike reads into me.  

     Spike, the ever perceptive, ever-changing one who seems able to see in anyone's head long before they ask, friend or foe.  Its true, he rarely follows up correctly on that insight, but nonetheless it's an insight that has been constant within him always.  Almost as a part of it, I think, or as a result, is that Spike doesn't hide what he experiences like his sire.  Spike shouts his every thought, his every sensation, his every passion defiantly to the maelstrom.  I can just watch his face and I know, if not what he's thinking, then what he's feeling.  I'm sure it's because he wants me to see it, wants me to believe him when he says he loves me.  But I think it's for the world as well, another way to rebel.  Spike, the unruly master come renegade.  It's his tenet, his creed.  Don't accommodate to anyone's expectations of civility, vampire or human, and if the world doesn't like how he feels or what he feels they can all go shove it up their respected places.

     Fuck it.  Here I am again, thinking about Spike.  Spike, who I just spurned yet again, only this time it was after telling him en musique that he was the only one in this dead world that made me feel anything at all. 

     It doesn't matter how blue his eyes are anyway. I'm not allowed to fall into them.  

     My fingers curl into a fist, and I scrape my nails against my palms, hoping maybe they'll bleed.  If I hold them tight long enough, then they'll go numb like the rest of me, and when I open them again—blessed sensation.  Tiny Thumbelina pinpricks cutting into my skin and muscle, and tiny little demons running around in my blood, shoving it through my veins and my capillaries again, sparking my nerves and sending little signals to my brain, telling me that it's time to move my fingers, because that's how to make the pinpricks stop.

     I don't want them to stop, any of it to stop.  Even pinpricks and friction on my palm reach me more than the looks I get from them when they don't know what to say.  When they don't know how to apologize.

     No.  I don't want to think about it.  I want to feel.  I want to see if I can make myself find something in this damn hell that I need again, need like I did before.  But I don't want to think about that either.

     Because there's only one thing that reaches me more than my drinking binges or my masochistic rushes, small though they may be.  One thing with fucking blue eyes as real as morning, one thing that I just ripped and tore and destroyed yet again, just because I can, and because part of me still believes none of this is happening.

     I push myself away from the stool, and start to walk the way he went.

     I'm sorry, Spike.  I'm going to use you again tonight.  

     I hope that you come out of it ok.


End file.
